James Foley’s Truth

We all owe a debt to James Foley. He was killed in the effort to bring news of the wars in the Arab world to the rest of us, to make them more humanly comprehensible. Foley, who was murdered, on video, by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, was acting on behalf of two principles: the right to know and the need to know. In this sense, Foley’s father did not exaggerate in calling him “a martyr for freedom.” The more I learn about the man and his work, the more my admiration grows. His journalism was clear-eyed, empathetic, and without the bravado that can creep into war reporting as an anesthetic against fear. By the accounts of his former fellow-prisoners (those who happen to be citizens of countries that pay ransom to terror groups), he was generous, thoughtful, good-humored, unbreakable in spirit. If you had to be shackled with someone in terrifying circumstances, for months on end, you would want it to be James Foley.

His heartbreaking last letter to his family, memorized and transmitted by a released hostage, since the kidnappers would have confiscated it, was composed to give his loved ones exactly what they needed to hear—he was thinking of them, not of himself. In the repellent “confession” that ISIS forced on him before his murder, it isn’t Foley’s words that matter—it’s his dignity in extremis, the self-possession in his face and posture, a final rebuke to the masked thug with a knife. ISIS created a slick propaganda video, but it ended up showing the world deep truths, about itself and about James Foley.

Among the many reasons to mourn Foley’s death is the loss of his reporting, and of reporting in general, from Syria. News of the civil war from Western media organizations has been dwindling as security has deteriorated, and it is now likely to dry up. Local Syrian reporters face an even greater threat. The Committee to Protect Journalists says that at least eighty journalists have been kidnapped since the start of the war and at least seventy have been killed, almost all of them Syrians, and almost all in 2012 and 2013. So far this year, the confirmed number of journalists killed is down to six, Foley being the most recent. (Solid information is increasingly difficult to get.) This cannot be because working conditions in Syria have improved. One likely explanation is that few reporters, and even fewer who reach Western audiences, are still covering the war.

This would be disastrous under any circumstances, but it is especially calamitous now. During August, normally a somnolent month in Washington, officials and media outlets have exploded in alarm about ISIS. The Administration has moved from virtually no American military involvement to launching dozens of air strikes against ISIS positions in northern Iraq, providing heavy weapons to the Kurdish peshmerga, discussing dramatic increases in arms and in training to whatever is left of the Free Syrian Army, beginning surveillance flights over Syria, and signalling that U.S. air power will be used against ISIS in the parts of Syrian territory that the organization controls. This is all too often the way of American foreign-policy-making: wild swings between indifference—born of bad memories, bad choices, and the relative safety that comes from having two oceans between us and most global disasters—and hysteria.

The pattern almost always means underreaction or overreaction, and usually with an extremely short attention span. Three years ago, when the crisis was in Libya, America, with European allies, intervened for a few weeks. Then came a characteristic failure to follow up and to stay engaged, as President Obama admitted to David Remnick earlier this year. For the past two years, Libya has meant just one thing in Washington: a polemic about the attack on a U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi and the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens. This argument has essentially nothing to say about the political collapse and growing chaos in Libya, which tells you something unwelcome but true about the state of American politics. It’s not a climate conducive to long-term, intelligent policymaking. Now Tripoli, the Libyan capital, may be about to fall to an Islamist militia, and it would be hard to say that there is any American policy to address that.

This mood is fuelled by the kind of hyper-partisan foreign-policy punditry that’s been with us since the end of the Cold War, and which is growing worse as social media makes élites forget how to think. The debate about ISIS almost automatically becomes a debate about who’s to blame for it: who started the Iraq War, who withdrew from it, who supported Nouri al-Maliki, who didn’t support the Syrian rebels, who helped to create ISIS, who failed to see ISIS coming, whose policies turned Muslims into jihadists, who has a right to say anything at all. These arguments are a sweet substitute for the thankless task of formulating honest answers to the questions raised by ISIS, which would inevitably mean advocating morally dubious actions with no certainty of a good outcome, as well as having to repudiate many of one’s earlier views.

Yesterday morning, for example, Bret Stephens, of the Wall Street Journal, wrote that the answer to ISIS is “hard power,” a realization, he said, that Obama and other liberals have reached too late, which proves that Obama got every question about terrorism wrong, while George W. Bush got every question right: “Are we going to fight terrorists over there—or are we going to wait for them to come here? Do we choose to confront terrorism by means of war—or as a criminal justice issue?” ISIS, Stephens concludes, retroactively justifies Bush’s post-9/11 policies.

Such total vindications happen only in the airless world of partisanpunditry, where contaminating facts can be sealed out—something that wasn’t possible for American troops, or for anyone else who spent time in Iraq and learned the hard way what the Journal’s foreign-affairs columnist didn’t: that military force is futile without politics; that if you can’t begin to answer questions about the day after you’ll achieve nothing by getting into the fight today. (Stephens’s central point was that I’ve been a reliable shill for Obama’s foreign policy—he must not have read this, this, this, this, or this, let alone my reporting from Iraq in the magazine.) It’s impossible to have lived through the bitter experience of the Iraq War and fail to grasp these simple truths, unless you spent those years in an ideological straitjacket. There’s nothing wrong with making a living as a pundit, but as a substitute for reporting it can be a disaster.

Too much of August’s sound and fury over ISIS is taking place in a vacuum of knowing and thinking ahead. Here are a few of the questions that any serious policymaker should address:

• What kind of short- and long-term threats do ISIS militants pose to the U.S.? What are their capabilities and intentions? Between Obama’s “jayvee team” remark to Remnick, in January, and Chuck Hagel’s “beyond anything we have seen” comment last week, where does the truth lie?

• What can air strikes against ISIS positions in Syria achieve without coördination with ground troops?

• Are there any Syrian rebel groups that are still capable of functioning like the Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi special forces in northern Iraq, as ground troops that can take positions abandoned by ISIS under U.S. air strikes?

• When we talk about remaining “moderate” rebels, who are they, who are their leaders, what are their interests and loyalties, what is their fighting condition?

• If Haider al-Abadi becomes the next Prime Minister of Iraq, what can he be offered in exchange for a pledge to end government support for the Shia militias that have alienated Iraqi Sunnis and created a base of popular support for ISIS?

• How extensive is support among Iraqi Sunnis for the anti-ISIS uprising of leading sheikhs in Anbar province? Can American air power be brought to bear in conjunction with their efforts without strengthening ISIS? How much support would the Saudis offer in Anbar?

• How can Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, and the Emirates be brought into a loose coalition against ISIS?

• Is Iran willing to discuss a post-Assad government in Syria as part of a larger negotiation over coördinating strategies with the U.S. to destroy ISIS, the common enemy? If not, is there any ground for American-Iranian coöperation in the fight against ISIS?

• Can Iran play any part without alienating the Gulf countries?

• What is the larger American strategy to contain and defeat ISIS? What are its military, political, diplomatic, economic, and cultural aspects?

The questions aren’t rhetorical, and the answers aren’t obvious. To know what we’re getting into, we need information that keeps up with the constantly shifting realities across the most dangerous areas of Syria and Iraq. We need people like James Foley, and now that he’s gone his value seems incalculable.

An update: There was one bit of good news in August. The Iraqi I wrote aboutrecently, whom I called “Ali,” finally received his Special Immigrant Visa and arrived with his family in America on Monday. Congratulations to the State Department for doing the right thing, and to Ali, whose real name is Yousif al-Timimi. Yousif risked his life for human rights and democracy in Iraq. May he have the safe, productive, and free life in this country that sadly isn’t possible in the land of his birth.